Jonathan J. Prinz / Beyond All That

Public vs. Private

One of the many myths being spread about healthcare reform is that private insurance companies couldn’t possibly compete with a public plan like an expanded Medicare.  Nonsense!  Ironically what belies this myth is just the straw man put up as proof by opponents: the Post Office.  They prefer to cite the Post Office, which has nothing to do with delivering health services, as an example of the government’s inability to run anything instead of Medicare that does, and successfully so.

Well, was there anything (probably bills) in your mailbox this week?  Did you have any concern about the card you sent to grandma (assuming the government hasn’t killed her) arriving?  The fact is that the Post Office does work.  More relevant in the context of the current debate is that private companies (notably FedEx and UPS) are very successfully competing with the public Post Office, this despite their being late to the game.  When, for example, FedEx was started, the Post Office was long entrenched both in fact and in our minds as the primary shipper of record.  Private enterprise found vulnerabilities in their service and capitalized (providing overnight delivery) on them.  They have been making money, lots of it, for most of the time since.  And guess what?  The competition has made the Post Office better.

So what makes any intelligent person believe that private insurance companies couldn’t compete with a government insurance program?  Of course, as FedEx and UPS have shown us, they can.  In fact, as a result of the competition the private insurers  (like the Post Office  did) are likely to get better at what they do and probably increase their bottom line as a result. Competition in a free market society is, we are told, a good thing.  Do those in private enterprise think so little of themselves that they can’t compete with anyone, including the government?  Moreover, if the premise that Uncle Sam can’t manage things well is really true, then all the better.  It won’t be a fair fight.

By way of disclosure, I’m insured by Medicare and think everyone, regardless of age, should have the option of being as well.  Without that, universal healthcare will remain a dream not a reality.  If you have any questions in that regard, don’t ask your member of Congress or insurance carrier,  ask your neighbor or one of your uninsured or underinsured kids.

Rage

The rage being displayed at Town Hall forums is more than disturbing, but by no means surprising.   When Barack Obama assumed the presidency we assumed (or at least hoped for) a new era of civility.  That, of course, was never possible, certainly not by itself.  Bitter dispute has been in the air and systematically fostered for almost four decades.  Ironically, while much of the current rage is coming from the Right, it was the liberal columnist Tom Braden who is credited with bringing its emblematic broadcast Crossfire to CNN.  While Braden, who started the Left/Right dual on radio in 1977, died earlier this year, his opposite number Pat Buchanan continues to spew vitriol in the cable world.  Crossfire set a tone, one that has been taken to its predictable heights by people like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly but also by Keith Obermann.  It has also raised its ugly head on the floors of the House and Senate and is a pervasive leitmotif in political discourse at all levels.

Rage as a method of communication is corrosive.  Shouters whether they be domestic squabblers, schoolyard disputants or anyone else are rarely, if ever, listeners.  Rage is an often-irrational emotional expression and it’s no wonder that it is so often accompanied by illogical outbursts or purposeful misinformation.  The whole idea is if we yell loud enough our opposite number will be intimidated and as a result even accept our claims as fact not fiction.  Sadly, it often works.

Pundits of all stripes are rushing to microphones and into “print” to explain the underlying causes of this rage.  Presenting themselves as objective rational and evenhanded voices, they say that healthcare proposals, the current subject of rage, have not been adequately explained.   They say Americans are unnerved by government takeovers (somewhat exaggerated) of banks and auto companies and fear for our free market system.  They speak of underlying concerns of White America who, despite voiced pride in the accomplishment, see the first African American President as a token for their own projected loss of majority status.  All of this may explain some of what is going on, but it is an of-the-moment rationalization, beside the point.

Rage is who we have become.  It is a pervasive and debilitating national illness, one that needs to be addressed before it becomes terminal.  It has been suggested that part of the problem on the Republican side is an absence of leadership.  In fact, the leadership it has is playing a significant role in stoking the rage and one can’t help but wonder (considering its self-defeating potential) to what end.  But again, blaming their current situation is just another distraction.  It’s not a one-sided partisan problem but what as become a universal way of doing. 

Some have suggested that quieting rage must be a prime objective of the President.  He should use his extraordinary communicative skills to that end.  I can’t disagree.  But in truth all of the burden can’t stand on his shoulders.  The sad thing is that it isn’t only the Republicans who seem to lack leadership; there is a widespread vacuum in that regard.  The country is bereft of credible moral voices.  Walter Cronkite, not the man but a most trusted figurehead, is not to be found.  To be sure we have individualized social and religious leaders, but they speak largely to and for their own constituencies.  They lack national name or face recognition.  Everyone is, or seems to be, a partisan.  None of those "evenhanded" voices we hear explaining rage are in fact independent.  They are but pretenders.

Historians have long debated whether leaders make the times or whether circumstance produce them.  My best guess is that it is a combination of both.  One thing I do know for sure is that the first step is to observe, to really listen.  The next, and this is an absolute requirement, is to look in the mirror.  That may help us understand if we ourselves are part of the problem, which is surely the case if only in our silence.  But the most important thing we should be asking ourselves, and most especially those with a voice and a potential following, is what are we going to do about this national rage?  We had better do it soon.

Healthcare: It's not about ME!

That we have a problem with healthcare is now broadly accepted.  Nonetheless, polls suggest that most of America’s covered are satisfied with their own insurance.  This finding mirrors the seeming inconsistency that, while Congress is held in basement level esteem, the majority of us are satisfied with our own representation.  Go figure.  We seem to place supreme value on incumbency, personal or societal, which is why we are so stubbornly resistant, if not to the idea, then to the reality of change.  As the August recess looms, the President’s healthcare imitative will be put to the test, and the outcome is by no means certain.  Indeed those satisfaction numbers could spell real trouble, especially when coupled with the finding by ABC that over 80% of respondents worry that their own cost might rise or that their own coverage diminish.  That 80% plus number is most telling, not only for the healthcare debate, but also for what it says about our society as a whole.   To put mildly, we have become an increasingly selfish people.  It's all about ME.  What’s worse is that not only do we want what we have, and more of it; we begrudge others their share.  That’s why the disparity between the “have’s” and the “have not’s” is growing at an alarming rate.

It may well be that whatever changes are made in healthcare will have some (likely marginal) impact on those of us who are covered.  But this effort is not about me.  It’s about those Americans who don’t have insurance.  In that sense, even polling the insured is a mere,  if not willful, distraction because what we have is not at issue, at least in a fundamental sense.   Again, it’s not about me, but about my neighbor.  Perhaps the Golden Rule is universal to all faiths but it has become a largely meaningless platitude.  We pay it pious lip service, but for all practical purposes, to paraphrase the famous Mr. Butler, we regularly tell our neighbors, “frankly my dears, we don’t give a damn.”

We may berate the greed on Wall Street, which on its level is unconscionable, but relatively speaking most of us do live in glass houses.  So our politicians are attuned (also selfishly) to be more concerned about the proverbial “me”, the modestly or greatly advantaged, than the mostly or completly disadvantaged.  One of the newest ploys is to suggest reform will lead to euthanasia, while the reality is that the current system of large-scale depravation is all too often an act of murder.  People are getting sicker and dying prematurely because they have no insurance or are massively underinsured, not the reverse.

The ugly truth of this debate is that the opponents of healthcare expansion and reform at best are deaf and heartless and at worst are nothing other than malicious.  They may not live physically in a gated community but seem to blot out the sounds and sights of depravation.  It’s bad enough when individuals are selfish; it’s catastrophic when leaders act with nothing less than criminal neglect.  I have vivid memories of heated debates about impending socialized medicine.  That was when Truman was President so let’s not talk about rushing into reform some six decades later.  Medicare, a controversial program when it was finally passed was not, as some obstructionists argued at the time, the end of the world, quite the contrary. It’s callous that opponents of healthcare reform point to the Post Office and not it for proof that government programs don’t work.  Have any of them bothered to ask their parents?

The President argues the economic imperative of healthcare reform.  I can’t disagree and in fact wonder, for example, what would have happened to our auto industry had universal healthcare been put in place back in the Truman years.  Leaving aside their misguided product decisions, would their manufacturing have been uncompetitive absent the burden of private healthcare?  People say they are confused about the many proposals on the table.  My cynical side would say, calculated confusion, but for the moment forget about economics and confusion.  The real question before us is not about this or that approach.  It’s about us – who we have become, who we are and who we will be.

Fixing healthcare is a matter of values, yes family values.  It is about how and if we care about and for each other.   It is a test of character, our national and personal character.  In many ways, I think it is a watershed issue, a test of our viability.  It’s one that we will fail only at our collective peril.

Post Racial. Forget it!

Sergeant Crowley did “act stupidly”, if nothing else then in arresting in his own home Skip Gates, among the most distinguished and well known academics in the country.  And the election of Barack Obama as President, notwithstanding, race, including rightful pent up anger against manifestations of ongoing institutional discrimination, remains a significant issue.  I don’t have a single African American friend who has not experienced it and whose reaction is equally one of visceral outrage.   So, too, did race remain center stage throughout the recent largely boring Sotomayor hearings which, being a masochist, I watched from beginning to end.  I really need to get a life.

Perhaps the soon-to-be Justice didn’t reveal much during those maddingly choreographed hearings, but I for one found them most (and disturbingly) revealing.  In that, there were two principal players, Judge Sotomayor and Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, the committee’s ranking Republican.  Sessions had famously once been turned down for a judgeship by the same committee in part because of the kind words he had to say about the Klan and his prosecution (unsuccessful) of civil rights workers.  This time around, joined by his Republican lemmings, Sessions obsessed over a few words in the text of an inspirational speech (delivered several times) and a single case of claimed discrimination against white fire fighters to which he and they returned repeatedly during their individual statements and three rounds of questioning.  Both had an undeniable subtext of racism, not to mention outrage that a Hispanic (or for that matter a woman) would dare make yet another incursion into the old boys club.

“I would hope” Judge Sotomayor had told her young audiences, “that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”  Well “would hope” is not an absolute claim but rather an aspiration for personal performance and “a white male who hasn’t lived that life” hardly suggests every white male.  And what exactly is “that life”?  To be sure, it’s the experience of being an ethnic minority (ask an earlier generation of the Kennedy or Scalia families about that) but also in her case of being poor and of succeeding by dint of perseverance and hard work.  It’s also not forgetting where you came from even if you have been fortunate enough to reach a different and exalted place.  It took a woman Justice Ginsburg to enlighten male colleagues with only sheltered locker room experience about the special and potentially traumatic indignity an impressionable young girl would experience in a strip search.  Indeed, and despite her difference on the subject with Justice O’Conner, would anyone dare even raise an eyebrow if Sotomayor had suggested to those students that a “wise woman” might make (or definitely would make) a better decision than a group of men?  Race, or more specifically pride in race, makes the difference.

If you have any doubt about the undertone of racism, consider two supporting complaints: that the Judge had served on the board of the Puerto Rican Defense Fund and, as Sessions said in his opening remarks, “Judges have cited foreign laws” suggesting she was innately that kind of judge.  Both remind us of Sotomayor’s “otherness” and of her fluency with an alien tongue – clearly not fully American.  But of course we’re not supposed to come to such conclusions in this post racial world.  As we learned, even hinting that the arrest of Professor Gates was not a good thing was considered getting the President off message, and a happily compliant press looking for conflict and ratings made sure it was just that.  To win office Barack Obama had to develop a post racial strategy, one that is familiar to any person of color, or of a minority religion for that matter, who wants to succeed in this “pluralistic” society.  As columnist Bob Herbert put it, “The message that has gone out to the public is that powerful African-American leaders like Mr. Gates and President Obama will be very publicly slapped down for speaking up and speaking out about police misbehavior, and that the proper response if you think you are being unfairly targeted by the police because of your race is to chill.”  It is a message that leaves Herbert with outrage, and rightly so.  In fact we should all be outraged and ashamed that at this late date, and after all we’ve been through, we have not reached a post-racial age or anything close to it.

Even the complaint that Barack Obama is trying to do too much may bespeak and undertone of “how uppity of him to think like that.”  The alarming fact that a majority of Republicans now believe that he is not a native born American and thus really not Constitutionally entitled to his office, is even more blatant.  The behind the back snickers endure not only for African Americans and Latinos but also for anyone who is somehow different.  Asian Americans, Jews and even Mormons know the sound of those whispers all too well.  The irony of course is that the one time “majority” is fast losing its numerical supremacy.  Perhaps in the end that is really what’s bothering them.  Jeff Sessions, the essence of the man, is still fighting the civil war and the irate fire fighters of New Haven do feel themselves victimized by altered demographics.  Entitlement doesn’t cut it any more, and their trying to overturn affirmative action is like putting a finger in the dike in the face of an oncoming flood.  Pluralism will ultimately win out, and all would do well not to stand in its way, which will only lead to shared and universal pain.

Sonia Sotomayor will undoubtedly join the highest court in the land within a few days. Henry Louis Gates Jr. will continue with his work at Harvard and take center stage in yet another PBS series.  Barack Obama will likely prevail in getting a lot of things done.  All of them are here and here to stay.  That said, seeing them before us, we shouldn’t forget the vast majority who remain left behind and those, including them, who are expected to walk on eggs to survive.

Ambiguity

I missed Doubt when it played on Broadway and was late to see its movie translation.  Now I can’t get it out of my head.  John Patrick Shanley has written a powerful and timely parable.   The storyline, if you’ve not seen either version, echoes the now infamous sex abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church and about which I wrote in a recent post, Where was God.  Its main characters, a nun parochial school principal and the parish’s priest, are oil and water in a contest of wills and of credibility.  They are imperfect souls and each, expressed powerfully at separate times of naked candor, has doubts.  Each is also the accuser of the other; Sister Aloysius pointing her enraged finger at what she believes to be a “child molester”, Father Flynn suggesting that she is holding the school back, out of touch with modern times and needs.  The film version pits Meryl Streep against Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Need I say more?

 

The script is one of accusations, but leaves us to draw our own conclusions.  How we come out may be colored by what we know today and what was not known (or revealed) in 1964, the time in which the story is set.  It is Shanley’s genius of not providing the answer that keeps our minds turning and, of course, forces us to join the protagonists in doubt.

 

To me the strength, and perhaps the larger message, of the drama is not so much doubt as it is ambiguity.  We’re faced with two characters, a dour aging schoolmarm nun who is disciplined to the point of cruelty and an affable priest who easily wins the hearts of his flock.  Both are vulnerable though Flynn more transparently so.   The accusations made are not of moral equivalence, being mired in the rigid past holds no candle to child molestation.  Yet the potential purveyor of the lesser evil is painted with a very dark brush while he of the alleged much greater wrong shines in the light.   We instinctively dislike her and are attracted to him.  Ambiguity.

 

So the parable here doesn’t relate so much to what we now know about the goings behind the veil of professed piety in any given church, but in how many of us view religion and, for that matter, much of our society.  It isn’t so much that we have doubts, though that is also true, but that we are confounded by the ambiguity.  We are torn between promise and repeated disappointment.  What should be good, what we expect to in fact be perfect, falls short, often terribly so.  What’s projected to be extraordinary is transparently human and flawed.  The recent “falling from grace” of a number of high profile politicians didn’t disturb us because they “violated” their marriage contract (not that we condone it), but because they had been so publically sanctimonious about their own morality and so judgmental, even accusative, of others.  So, too, when we see “pious” mullahs send out goon squads to beat up citizens with different views (much as brown shirts beat up Jews in Nazi Germany), we see a larger and wider ambiguity about professed piety in other places.  That poses a serious problem, one that we are all being forced to consider.  Our world is an ambiguous place and that can be unnerving, even more unnerving than doubt.

 

When God Rules

Theocracy and democracy are antithetical and incompatible. The idea of an Islamic Republic is an oxymoron, but so too is a Christian, Jewish, or Hindu Republic.  The dictionary defines republic as “a state in which supreme power is held by the people.”  In that, even “state religions” work only if they are largely ignored, relegated to the symbolic and ceremonial.  Think England and Denmark.  Any semblance of democracy under religious rule is at best destined to be compromised and at worst a cosmetic charade.  At some inevitable point, when “democracy” finds itself in conflict with God, or to put it more accurately God as those in power would define it, kiss the voice of the people goodbye.  

So it is a consideration of theocracy and in a larger sense the role religion plays in governance that comes to mind most in watching the sad and frustrating events unfold in Iran.  Not surprisingly, the newly repackaged Newsweek devotes its current issue to the subject beginning with a stage setting piece by editor Jon Meacham entitled, Theocracies are Doomed, Thank God.  Meacham, who with Sally Quinn also moderates the Washington Post’s On Faith “conversations on religion and politics”, has written extensively on religion’s role in the making of, and he would likely say sustaining, our nation.

Largely because it is out of tune with modernity, Meacham contends theocracy can’t survive.  Hopefully he’s right but I am less sanguine about that happening any time soon.  The fact is that, to one degree or another, we have been the throws of modernity for more than a century and theocracies, some relatively newly minted like Iran’s, are still with us.  When the Shah was deposed in 1979 we certainly thought of ourselves as living in modern times even if we lacked some of gadgets that have become so ubiquitous in our lives.  If the monarchy of Jordan or the constitutional dictatorship in Egypt were swept aside today, chances are they will be replaced by some kind of theocratic rule, just as would be the case if the Pakistani democracy fails.  In fact, today’s theocrats don’t seem undermined by modernity.  They actually use its tools very effectively to their advantage in spreading or solidifying their power.   Meacham would say that’s not his point, that modernity empowers the individual, and over time he may be right, but “over time” is the pesky detail that may prevent many of us, regardless of our age, from ever seeing it.

Of course you don’t have to have a full-blown theocracy to have religion playing a significant, and in my view detrimental, role in governance.  The experience of America in the last three decades has brought that home to all of us.  Alan Keyes, whose last appearance on the political stage was as Barack Obama’s opponent in the Illinois Senate race, has become somewhat of a caricature, but is perhaps more upfront about the motivations of the Religious Right than others.  Keyes is an unabashed theocrat who, understanding Constitutional restrictions at the federal level, has argued for the establishment of theocracies in individual states.  Keyes-like thinking and power grabs continue, and there is no indication that they won’t do so into the foreseeable future.  “To say that theocracies are doomed,” Meacham writes,” is not to argue that religion is any less important in our age.”  He sees it continuing its active role but within a democratic context.  Of course, the same modernity that may ultimately spell the demise of theocracies could spell trouble for religion itself.  After all in the ultimate sense, all religions believe that God rules and I see trends that modernity, especially as expressed by a growing number of our young people, is beginning to question that fundamental premise. 

Theocracies are the invention and tool of orthodox religion, often at the extreme.  That’s not surprising because democracy is anathema to all orthodoxies where “free will” in the sense that whatever individuals, even a majority, may want at any given time is simply not possible if it goes contrary to doctrine.  Mortals speaking for themselves never have the last word.  If democracy were at play, the Catholic Church would be ordaining priests and promoting protected safe sex.  There are rules and rulers who have been empowered, often claimed to be empowered, by the divine to set limits and to be the ultimate arbiters as is the case, at least to this point, with the “supreme leader” in Iran.  So whether or not votes were counted accurately or at all is really irrelevant because under any circumstance the power of the ballot box is subject to, and arbitrarily accepted by, those who invoke a “higher authority”.

However enduring religion may be and no matter how it may enrich the lives of its adherents, when God rules in whole or in part humans always come off with the short end of the stick.  The ultimate supreme ruler, the unseen and unseeable God gives enormous license and cover to those mortals who purport to speak in “the name of the divine”, those ultimately self-proclaimed surrogates here on earth.  Divine authority is a discussion stifler, a showstopper.  “God says” is the ultimate trump card of theocracies, but also of any debate whether on matters of state or those religious-based issues that still plague us like abortion, same-sex marriage, stem cell research and end of life.  In each, logic and even empirical evidence doesn’t play, much less have a chance.  Once God is in power, absolute democracy dies.

Of course we do live in a democracy and a majority of our citizens consider themselves religious.  They are troubled by what they see in Iran and what people are doing elsewhere in “God’s name”.  They urgently tell themselves and their children, that’s not me/us, not my/our religion.  And they are right and perhaps also wrong.  For those who have been alienated by religion, it isn’t necessarily the religion they have experienced first hand that turns them off, but where religion can, does and did go.  It may be an unfair way to judge religion as a whole, but it’s an unmistakable fact.  Looking at the vehemence of those on the hard right when it comes to social issues here or the brutality being expressed by the Mullah’s in Iran, I see a kind of desperation at play.  Perhaps I think modernity will take us to a different place than does Jon Meacham, but the passion and over-the-top action of all these “religious” bespeaks people who see their world and their particular values system coming undone.  Iran brings that sense of desperation to the fore, as did the recent murder of Dr. Tiller.   It’s hard to argue that we’re not headed for more of it as the desperation level rises.  Theocracies may be doomed, but they are still very much with us.

"Our Problem" with Marriage

My father, who knew it first hand, always said anti-Semitism is not a problem of Jews but of anti-Semites.  I thought of that when seeing white men deride Justice-designate Sotomayor’s musings about the wisdom of a Latina woman.  Let’s remember that this is a country in which such men were long considered the only people wise enough to make any decisions from the bench, much less vote, and that the current President of the United States is in office despite, not because of, the start given us by the founding white males.  So, beyond the now retrograde partisanship of these extreme voices, there is also a disingenuousness that speaks much more to their problem then hers.  What’s really bothering them is not what Sotomayor said, but that they still prefer seeing “one of their own kind” sitting on the Court.

In many ways that kind of self-serving thinking is what was always at the root of the civil rights suppression that gripped and stained our history.  It is how change impacts on our self-perception, how it affects us personally that counts, so we resist it.  I believe that dynamic is what’s at play in the ongoing controversy over same sex marriage.  If you have any doubt about how personally threatening it is, just consider that bill entitled, “The Defense of Marriage” – read that “self-defense”.  In many respects, the recent brutal murder of Dr. George Tiller notwithstanding, it is much deeper than that surrounding abortion.  True, opponents of choice consider abortion a “life and death” matter, but it’s not their life that hangs in the balance or more precisely their view of themselves.  Homophobia is not the problem of gays and lesbians but of heterosexuals who feel threatened by it.  In a very profound way, what some wishfully characterize as a “lifestyle” challenges what society has ingrained in us as “normal”.  I say wishful, because those who invoke that antiquated thinking are actually afraid that sexual preferences can be influenced like choosing one hairstyle over another just as racial bigots thought color could be transmitted at the water fountain.  Sexual orientation, like the pigment of our skin, is something we’re born with.  It can’t be acquired.  Regardless, the idea that gays and lesbians represent what is just one normal expression of human life is too much for some people to contemplate or to admit.

So the question we have to ask ourselves is not why same sex couples seek the right to marry, but why so many of us oppose it.  In that opposition, religion plays a central role and one that seems increasingly hard to defend.  Rick Warren, who some see as America’s pastor, doesn’t speak for all religions – some liberal clergy do embrace the idea of same-sex marriage – but expresses a classic answer that religion gives for many “why” questions: the force of longevity.  In explaining his opposition in a 2008 interview with Steven Waldman of Beliefnet he put it this way, “For 5,000 years, marriage has been defined by every single culture and every single religion - this is not a Christian issue.  Buddhist, Muslims, Jews - historically, marriage is a man and a woman.”  In short, we do it this way, because we always did.  By that logic Judge Sotomayor wouldn’t qualify for any bench, certainly not our highest court.   But Warren doesn’t leave it at that, adding what are much more revealing and substantive reasons for his opposition.  “God,” he tells Beliefnet, “who always acts out of love and does what is best for us, thought up sex.  Sex was God's idea, not ours.  Like fire, and many other things God gave us, sex can be used for good, or abused in ways that harm.  The Designer of sex has clearly and repeatedly said that he created sex exclusively for husbands and wives in marriage.”  No religious argument against same sex unions could be more clearly or honestly stated.

Same sex marriage goes against tradition and everything we’ve learned since hearing “see Dick and Jane run” or that has been inculcated in us by our religious upbringing.  The idea that the ideal life culminates in coming together with that perfect opposite sex partner – being “fruitful and multiplying”, doing the right and expected thing – is ingrained in us.  And for 90% of the population that’s exactly what can or does happen, though many very happy marriages don’t produce offspring either by choice or physical circumstance.  So, beyond all the other emotional and practical challenges they face in their ”failure to live up to the dream”, same sex couples find themselves fighting an uphill battle on marriage just because it threatens so many of our self-perceptions, our ideas of the norm.  All they want is to have what the rest of us can so effortless acquire for ourselves, and we don’t like it one bit.  How dare they?  Contrary to what Rick Warren and others contend, it isn’t so much that these unions redefine marriage; it is that we see them as redefining our own marriages, which is of course absurd, totally in our own minds.

Warren is right when he says, “A committed boyfriend-girlfriend relationship is not a marriage. Two lovers living together is a not a marriage. Incest [a gratuitous and inflammatory inclusion on his part] is not marriage.  A domestic partnership or even a civil union is still not marriage.”  That’s precisely the argument put forth by same sex couples.  But what he leaves out is that, in the end, marriage which has become such a loaded word, is the simply the formal institution that transforms an emotional commitment between two people into a contractual, theoretically permanent, obligation.  No more, no less.  We may opt to impose religious ceremonial on it, “sanctify” it, but that doesn’t change the underlying fact, nor is such ritual required by our legal system.  Why entering into that legal obligation called marriage, including the sanctifying part, should be denied any couple, heterosexual or homosexual, defies logic and fairness, equality under the law.  How can we honestly speak of family values without promoting the building of family units for everyone, even those don’t look like Dick and Jane, much less Adam and Eve?

A few states have finally legalized same sex marriage.  The tide may be changing.  In that, the recently announced alliance of the famously opposing litigators (Gore v. Bush), conservative Ted Olson and liberal David Boies, in representing litigants against California’s unfortunate Proposition 8 is particularly heartening.  It is likely that the case will end up before the Supreme Court where both are seasoned and noted practitioners.  Not only is this joint effort unusual, it may suggest that more of us are beginning to face the real and broad nature of being human in all its natural manifestations.  Indeed even people like Dick and Lynne Cheney, whose daughter is gay, understand that this is not a conservative vs. liberal but a real-life human issue.  I don’t know if the Olson/Boies Constitutional argument will prevail in court, but it appears that we are on our way to an inevitable change.  One of the benefits, perhaps the ultimate benefit, will be that it may make us think differently about ourselves.   Then it won’t be an “our” or “their” problem, but no problem at all.

Where was God?

Last Thursday, the NY Times reported that a commission established by Prime Minister Bertie Ahern back in 2000 finally issued its long awaited report.  It confirmed “tens of thousands of Irish children were regularly sexually and physically abused by nuns, priests and others for more than sixty years in hundreds of [Church run] residential institutions that housed the poor, the vulnerable and the unwanted”.   The last of these horrific places were closed only in the 1990s and there was, and remains, great resistance by both the Church and the Irish Department of Education to investigating, much less reporting, what occurred within their walls.  Sadly, as anyone who has followed the news in recent years knows, this is by no means an isolated case.   Even its breathtaking scope is not without peer.  William Lobdell in his recently published book “Losing my Religion” recounts the story of remote St. Michael Island “where a single Catholic missionary raped an entire generation of Alaska Native boys,” and he was not the sole abuser.  I had just finished reading Lobdell's book when the Dublin findings were made public.

Bill Lobdell has lost his faith, one that had been methodically and urgently won as an adult.  His is the story of a highly personal intensive religious pursuit, a journey that ultimately led him from being “born again” to the doorstep of a Catholic conversion.  Already a seasoned journalist, he felt triumphant in landing the religious beat for the LA Times.  At the time, he saw it as a made-in-heaven symbiotic dream job that combined a concurrent quest for personal faith and an equally dedicated professional pursuit as a reporter.  It morphed into a nightmare that would give him many troubled and sleepless hours.  What he hoped would be uplifting and reassuring turned to be just the opposite, beginning with his reporting on the fall of Michael Harris, a fabled Hollywood priest, and culminating on that Alaskan island.  What made the many stories of abuse he covered ultimately overwhelming were not so much the acts of the predatory priests, which could be explained on an individual basis, but the complicity and duplicity of the institutional Church.  It, he and others were to discover, engaged in a systematic effort to cover-up wrong doing that made Watergate pale in comparison, and it did so at the highest levels.

So where was God in all of this?  The great and classic religious question, one posed across all faiths, is, “why do bad things happen to good people?”  The bottom line answer to this question is some version of “God works in mysterious ways”. Not really a satisfactory response, but adequate for most believers.  The religious generally are willing to give God a pass, accepting that divine action is not always understood.  The widespread abuse that has enveloped the Catholic Church, actions of an institution as Lobdell puts it, that God “is supposed to be guiding”, can’t simply be construed as mysterious.  So they pose a much far more profound theological dilemma.  We may bemoan, but can accept, many of those bad things happening to good or innocent people by attributing them to “accidents” or illness-causing genetic flaws.  But the willful evil acts of those who claim to speak for God and act in God’s name are something totally different.  After all, Catholic doctrine views the Pope as Christ’s direct representative – he speaks and acts for God. The Cardinals, Bishops and priests (some of each class were involved) are his surrogates, exercising substantial power.  Only a priest can offer a Mass reenacting the sacrifice of Christ and it is the priest who is empowered to grant God’s absolution for human sin.  Lobdell understood that, and the underlying and corrosive question posed or implied by his book is, how could God allow divine surrogates to behave in that way, or condone the institutional behavior of the Church?  He finally submitted to this painful but logical Occam Razor answer, “the simplest explanation kept boomeranging back to me: there was no God.”

Let’s put that in a larger perspective.  If, as is the case with so many people, one believes that God has a hand in everything that happens – for example that he both spares and takes lives – then he must have a hand in approving the actions of his representatives here on earth.  You can’t believe that a priest can act in God’s name, and presumably approval, one minute and not in the next.  That’s precisely why the broad scale scandal that has overtaken the Catholic Church in recent years has turned so many Catholics away from their religion, and not inconsequentially has had a ripple effect of making many non-Catholics question their faith as well.  Where was God when all of this was going on?  Were the divine “eyes” simply averted, as someone once suggested was the case with the Holocaust?  If God is God, that’s hard, if not impossible, to believe.  God was clearly absent when everyone assumed the divine is always on watch, or as Bill Lobdell suggests, perhaps there is no God.

Moral Decisions

President Obama faces what can only be described as a moral dilemma when it comes to dealing with the past sins of his predecessor’s administration.  It is one that I am sure troubles him greatly, as it does me.  Much as we like to think moral decisions are simple and self-evident, many are in fact complex, and can’t necessarily be made in isolation.  They often carry with them unintended moral consequences.  That is exactly the case in our (not only his) present situation.  On the one hand we have what are euphemistically called “detainees”, an umbrella term that conjures up images of open-ended incarceration, general abuse, outright torture and overdue adjudication.   On the other, and make no mistake this is the core of the moral dilemma, we have the denial of access to healthcare for millions and a growing unemployment that has not only taken jobs from the working, but has dropped the structurally unemployed yet another rung lower on the ladder of survival.  Notice I didn’t say success.  Each of these, sorting out the truth of the past and finally righting our social system in the future, present moral issues because each impacts on the lives of human beings, not to mention the standards of our society.

The President has opted to make what some see as a pragmatic, and others may feel is a callous, choice: the future over the past.  Frank Rich suggests in the NY Times today that the in the end he can’t avoid the past and will ultimately have to release those photos and establish some kind of truth commission.  Perhaps, and my own instinct is to say, I hope so.  But Obama appears to believe that doing so poses too high a risk, one that, Rich’s contention notwithstanding, potentially will destroy not facilitate his agenda.  He has good reason to be concerned.  For a long time now, the American public has shown little ability to focus on more than one subject at a time.  We suffer a kind of mental retardation, fostered and fine-tuned by a media hungry for the kind of overwhelming stories that can drive ratings.  Think OJ, but in all fairness think all the way back the William Randolph Hearst.  Poignantly the deep financial trouble in which newspapers and the news media as a whole find themselves is only likely to exaggerate this self-serving need and worsen the situation.

Single stories, often shallow gossip and sensationalism, can (and do) suck the air out of everything else.  Think about these potential competitors for attention: the sensational misdeeds of the Bush years against the dry complexities of universal health care and how it will be delivered.  Is it any wonder that some conservatives, led on by the former Vice President, are now calling for full disclosure?  You can bet they understand the President’s “pragmatic” decision well and, despite their trademark pious chest beating, morality doesn’t factor into this at all.  It is the blood of debilitating distraction that they smell.   In a perfect world, yes in a truly moral world, Barack Obama and we along with him, would not face this terrible dilemma, this need to make choices.  That we are in this place, tells you how much trouble we’re really in, and none of us carries a “get-out-of-jail-free” card.  The press is single focused and collectively we eat it up, or at least the majority of us while the rest are complicit in their silence.  Detroit sells us environmentally disastrous vehicles and we buy them.  It’s become impossible to discern the chicken from the egg.  

The past and the future, a moral question?  That’s easy.  Reveal the past and improve the future; an unambiguous and consistent moral decision, but one that sadly may not reflect reality.  The President may be making the wrong choice here, but he has perhaps overwhelming evidence to support his decision.   Let’s also remember (as he probably does) that, while there is always ample time to consider the past, it may be running out to right the future.  In that context, perhaps the trade here is one of morality delayed to obtain morality realized.  It’s not pretty, but if we’re honest, we all make similar decision all the time.  We’re imperfect.

On the Sidelines

In her insightful new book “The Breakthrough”, journalist Gwen Ifill turns the spotlight on four remarkable African Americans: a congressman, a mayor (of the city where I grew up), a governor, and the President of the United States.  It is a political narrative with a recurring theme – the shift from the “Moses” to the “Joshua” generation.  Her principal subjects are beneficiaries of the civil rights movement; all were too young to have participated in it.  They are of Harvard and Yale not of Howard and Morehouse.  With some key Moses generation players still on or near the stage, the transition has not always been easy.  Some have tried to label these new generation leaders “post-racial”.  Of course that’s at one simplistic and impossible.  Race may play a different role, but it still hangs over them and us.  That said, what Artur Davis, Corey Booker, Deval Patrick and Barack Obama have in common is that they are speaking to and for a much broader audience with more comprehensive purpose.  The only post racial thing about it may be that they are pulling their audacity (as Obama has called it) off, in no small part because the larger generation of which they are a part has moved on as well.

It is impossible to think about the civil rights movement without the central role played in it by clergy, which in part accounts for the Biblical Moses-Joshua leadership metaphor.  In his final days, Martin Luther King, Jr. presciently declared, as did Moses, “I see the Promised Land, …I may not get there with you”.  So in thinking about Ifill’s exploration of generational shift, I can’t help but considering whether there is an analogy in religious leadership, a Moses and Joshua generation.  There is, but it has taken a very different turn.  The Moses generation of Martin King was deeply engaged in the world beyond the pulpit, and not only in civil rights.  King, and many of his Christian and Jewish colleagues were equally vocal about the Viet Nam war.  They were concerned about both injustice and peace.  Ironically, just as the societal engagement of the Black Joshua generation has expanded beyond the civil rights struggle, the vistas of the Joshua religious leadership have contracted, sometimes to what amounts to effectual disengagement.  Coming off decades in which religion played such a high profile, some would say heavy handed, role in the body politic that may seem an outlandish statement.  Let me explain.

King and his fellow activist clergy came to the civil rights movement as religious leaders.  They were specifically moved by their faith and routinely peppered their speeches with the language of the Bible and other religious writings.  They came out of religion but not to impose their specific religious doctrine on anyone else.  Their underlying message may have been rooted in their beliefs, but it was unmistakably universal.  King’s message could be uttered by Christians, Jews and Muslims or, for that matter, atheists with equal vigor and intent, and it was.  In contrast, the high profile religious leaders who became engaged “with society” in the Joshua generation did so with the intent of imposing their parochial beliefs on everyone else.  Their agenda was not achieving a unity of purpose around universal ideals but promoting laws and practices that would conform to their ideology.  By definition, their goals could not be universally embraced because they aren’t universal.  That is a profound difference.  Martin King used his civil rights won moral megaphone to oppose the Viet Nam war, but would never have used his position, as did Rick Warren, to lobby for Proposition 8, imposing his specifically religious view of marriage on everyone else.

The Moses generation of clergy used their pulpits to turn their congregation’s faces and minds outward.  Activism, such as it is in the Joshua pulpits, turns inward.  Today’s clergy are largely focused on the parochial to the degree that it’s hard to think of any religious leader across all denominations that is playing the universal role of a King, a William Sloane Coffin or an Abraham Joshua Heschel.  Aside from those seeking to impose their parochial agenda on all of us, religious leaders have moved to the sidelines.  They may have personal opinions on the broader issues that face our society, many of which have distinct moral implications.  They may sometimes speak of them within the confines of their sanctuaries, but they have no significant voice in the public square.  It took a New Yorker journalist to both expose and then to express moral outrage about Abu Ghraib.  The religious community remained relatively silent.  Imagine if that had happened when King and the Moses generation of religious leaders were on the scene.

Religion is losing followers and its response is to turn inward and focus on communicating its values and traditions to the immediately present and accounted for within its walls.  It sees survival in the parochial and, in doing so, has lost its universal voice.  Ifill’s subjects have all faced charges that they are insufficiently Black, as if opening to the world threatened their identity.  Perhaps today’s religious leaders fear attention to the outside, the universal, threatens their faith’s identity.  It sees the political Joshua generation of the Black Americans as one that is losing its identity by melding into the larger world of common ground, of why we are alike not why we are different.  Perhaps the religious Joshua generation believes it can’t afford that path, but society and religion itself has lost something from their disengagement.  Insularity feeds on itself, and religion is likely to pay a high price for its retreat from common concern.  The prophets would be dismayed.